ity of the poorer lands of the lower
part of the province.

Brantford is named after Brant, the celebrated Indian warrior chief,
and here the Mohawk tribe of the Five Nations have their principal
seat. This excellent race, for their adhesion to British principles in
the war of the Revolution, lost their territory in the United States,
consisting of an immense tract in the fair and fertile valley of the
Mohawk river, in the State of New York, through which the Erie Canal
and railroad now run, and possessed by a flourishing race of farmers.

I remember being told a curious story of the Dutch, who have their
homesteads on the Mohawk Flats, the richest pasture land in New York.
These simple colonists, preserving their ancient habits, pipes,
breeches, and phlegm, looked with astonishment at the progress of
their Yankee neighbours, and predicted that so much haste and action
would soon expend itself. At last came surveyors and engineers, those
odious disturbers of antiquity and quiet rural enjoyments: they
pointed their spirit-levels, they stretched their chains across the
fair fields of the quiet slumbering valley of these smoking Dutchmen.
The very cows looked bewildered, and Mynheer, taking his meerschaum
from his lips, sighed deeply.

They told him that a railroad was projected across his acres; he would
not have minded a canal. He had survived the wars of the Indians; he
had forgotten Sir William Johnson and his neighbouring castle; he had
gone through the rebellion of Washington without being despoiled; and
had finally, as he thought, settled down in the lovely valley of the
meandering Mohawk, in a flat very like what his ancestors represented
to him as the pictured reality of Sluys or Scheldtland. He had smoked
and dozed through all this excitement, and was just beginning to
understand English. The American character was above his
comprehension. He remembered George the Third with respect, because
his great grandfather was a Dutchman, who had ascended the British
throne, and had proclaimed Protestantism and _Orange boven_ as the law
of the colonies. He still thought George the Third his ruler; and
never knew that George Washington had, Cromwell-like, ousted the
monarch from his fair patrimony, on pretence that tea was not taxable
trans-atlantically.

The railroad came: Acts of Congress or of Assembly passed; and fire
and iron rushed through the happy valley. The patriarchs lifted up
their hands and their pipes in